Another look at M87*

© Event Horizon Telescope

The EHT recently released a new image of the shadow of the super massive black hole M87*, based on 2018 data. In the meantime the EHT array has been upgraded — it is now augmented by a dish in Greenland, along with higher data rates and more frequency bands.

The black hole shadow, on the other hand, has changed much less, which is reassuringly consistent with the predictions of general relativity. In particular, the radius of the shadow has remained the same, as expected, while the shift of the bright spot is also consistent with theoretical accounts of emmission from the turbulent accretion disk around the black hole.

(The EHT is well represented in Dwingeloo; Ilse van Bemmel, Mark Kettenis, Huib Jan van Langevelde, Junghwan Oh and Des Small of JIVE and Jessica Dempsey and Zheng Meyer-Zhao of ASTRON are all co-authors of this study.)